Animated Project Postmortem 2—How To Stand Apart in a Creative Crowd

Making the animated web series “A Universe of Trouble” clearly revealed my weaknesses. Or my main weakness, which is simple—I need to draw better.

What’s hard is figuring out the best and fastest way to learn to draw.

I know that much of animation is now and will continue to be computer-generated. But my passion has always been for drawing. It wasn’t until I did a weekend workshop given by a Pixar animator that I learned that computer animators don’t draw. I was shocked to learn this (in addition to learning that many computer animators have severe arm, wrist and hand pain) and I immediately saw an opportunity. With so many people creating so much great work, the challenge is how to stand apart from the competition. I think one answer to that question is to draw. (Another answer to that question is to be a better storyteller which I’ll discuss in another post.)

Additional reasons I want to improve my drawing are that I want to make graphic novels, I want my animation drawings to look better and I want to animate faster. Therefore it’s clear that I must start my skills improvement in one area: anatomy. 

Two weeks after completing “A Universe of Trouble,” I reviewed both the Stan Prokopenko Figure Drawing Fundamentals series and the Samantha Youssef gesture drawing syllabus. I also started studying perspective, working on mechanical drawing skills (based on Scott Robertson’s “How To Draw” book) and an animation project based on Moebius’s “Arazak."

And I immediately fell into the same problem I’ve had for the last 25 years—TOO MUCH WORK!

By trying to do a little bit of many things every day, I felt overwhelmed and that I was short-changing the areas I was AND wasn’t working on.

I have now tossed aside all study except the Proko studies. I completed my review of the Figure Drawing Fundamentals and am now studying the Human Anatomy series.

I’m confident that with a daily focus on this one area that I will, by or before the end of next year, have a solid grasp of human anatomy.

After anatomy I’m going to learn perspective and tone but…I won’t even THINK about those until anatomy’s done!